UNQUIET GRAVES: Horror movie reviews. Or, really, snacks. In the order in which I saw them:

Audition: Japanese horror; incredibly scary and suspenseful until the climax begins, about 20-30 minutes from the end. After that it devolved, from my perspective, into standard-issue icky-creepy-ouch. I loved the setup (widower auditions women for role of next wife, but becomes enthralled by intensely frightening beautiful lady with a secret) but the climax felt way too horror-movie, rather than actually horrifying. Still: scariest gray bag in movie history, you ask me.

May: I feel like I must have been missing something. It struck me as utterly predictable indie-Psycho. I'm pretty sure that people liked this movie for a reason, so if you did, please don't think I'm saying you're wrong: I'm saying I don't get it, and I'd be interested to hear what you think I didn't grasp here.

...I also saw Session 9 around the same time I saw these two movies, and between the three of them, I got thoroughly sick of "being hurt by others makes you a bad person" storylines. "I live in the weak and the wounded"--an idea that's more cruel than it is true; anti-Christian; and, three movies in a row, just wearying.

I actually got a lot out of Session 9, and I'll say the following four things with certainty: It looks absolutely amazing (it was filmed in a real, abandoned mental hospital, an enormous complex of sorrow--this setting is the reason to see the movie), it has a terrific blue-collar setup, the actors are great, and there are too many red herrings. It's a memorable and beautifully-shot movie. I'm not sure what, if anything, I have to say about mental illness in horror; Session 9 equivocates between being a movie about past suffering and being a movie about creepy people. I didn't like the fact that the movie didn't even seem to realize that it was exploitive.

It's a powerful B-movie, basically. I love B-movies, but a lot of them... not so much with the thinking.

Ringu and then The Ring: It's probably easier to talk about these two together, even though it might well be true that people generally prefer whichever one they saw first. I strongly preferred Ringu.

Some of that was because, compared to the American remake, it maximized horror elements that always work for me (shots of the black and churning ocean) and minimized horror elements that never do (lugubrious children). I will say for certain that the soundtrack of Ringu is just miles beyond the predictable soundtrack of The Ring--Ringu's inhuman noises genuinely kept me up at night afterward, jolting awake at every little rumble or squeak. I'm pretty sure the acting is better, more physical and horrifying. Ringu is a scary, scary movie, with an awesomely uncompromising ending. (And yes, I realize there's one way in which the American ending is actually more merciless. I'm not sure why I still preferred the Japanese one--possibly just because the ending is deeply character-centered, and I cared about the Japanese characters more, see below.)

Sean Collins writes about the way in which the American version has certain culture-war/cautionary-tale elements. And I mean, yes, your parent is not your pal; but the addition of this cautionary element is the main reason I disliked the American version from the start, and only slowly got over myself and started noticing ways in which it was also good, and even the occasional improvement over the Japanese version. (You should see both, btw, although I agree with the friend who strongly urged me to see Ringu first.)

Anyway, the American characters are just so incredibly unpleasant! They're rude and annoying (yes, the kid too, very much so), and I didn't want to be around them. The Japanese characters are kind of generic, but generically likable. The lady even remembers to take off her shoes when she enters a creepy scary cabin she's casing! I think that makes the indictment of the story's ending more universal in the Japanese version: Cautionary tales are inherently less scary if you don't do the bad behavior in question, and I, you know, don't cuss in front of children, and I try not to do that obnoxious American "*sigh* I'm sorry, but not really" vocal inflection. Or maybe I can phrase it as: "Be as bad as you want, it doesn't matter" is less scary to me than, "Be as good as you can, it won't matter"....

ps: Possibly wrong, or banal, oversimplifying thought: Could it be said that The Ring turns its merciless storyline toward the horror of children as moral equals, and Ringu drives the same story toward the horror of family as hierarchy?

YOUR MOM'S A MAMMAL!: So today I finally got to see the new(ish) Hall of Mammals at the Museum of Natural History. It's so awesome!!!

The old Hall was totally fun, but basically just stuffed animals in poses behind glass. I loved it, but I don't think I ever learned much beyond, "Look! wolfs!" You needed more focus than a child can typically muster to not only read but also remember the wall captions.

The new Hall is improved in every way. The taxidermy is terrific: the leaping, clutching, clawing lionesses attacking their prey; the ickle vampire bat feasting on a fake human foot (!); the stalking jaguar and spraddle-legged giraffe and superb Cape porcupine. At least two critters were posed nursing at their mommies' teats, which I thought was absolutely adorable.

The interactive displays are geared to a child's level of ability and concentration, but manage to be fun and informative nonetheless. Guess which skull belongs to a nocturnal creature, and lift the flap for an answer! (It's the one with the bigger eyesockets.) Find the food sources hidden in the autumn forest! What's a monotreme, and why? (...Ew, is why, it turns out.) The new Hall understands that a "night monkey" is kind of cool, but "the world's only night monkey" is much cooler. Kids get interesting debates and ideas that could lead to future reading and learning, presented in a way they could easily remember: There's a dingo posed in spotlight, with a shadowed thylacine in the background; you can press a button to spotlight the thylacine, read a brief blurb on when the dingo displaced the thylacine, and see a photo of two dingos fastening on one prey animal, with an explanation that cooperative hunting is one reason the dingo may have triumphed over its ecological rival. There was really quite a lot of information in a brief caption, presented quickly but memorably, and in a way that engaged both reason and imagination.

I was really, really impressed. Wildly recommended!

"IN PRAISE OF DISENCHANTMENT": My Inside Catholic column, on superstition.

I've got a four-leaf clover
And it ain't done me a single lick of good --
I'm still a drunk and I'm still a loser
Living in a lousy neighborhood
-- Old 97's, "Four-Leaf Clover"

Bioy Casares había cenado conmigo esa noche y nos demoró una vasta polémica sobre la ejecución de una novela in primera persona, cuyo narrador omitiera o desfigurara los hechos e incurriera en diversas contradicciones, que permitieran a unos pocos lectores--a muy pocos lectores--la adivinación de una realidad atroz o banal. Desde el fondo remoto del corredor, el espejo nos acechaba. Descubrimos (en la alta noche ese descubrimiento es inevitable) que los espejos tienen algo monstruoso. Entonces Bioy Casares recordó que uno de los heresiarcas de Uqbar había declarado que los espejos y la cópula son abominables, porque multiplican el número de los hombres.
--Jorge Luis Borges, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"--yes, I'm trying to read Spanish for the first time in at least ten years.

"NOTES ON THE MANAGEMENT OF SPOILED IDENTITY": I'm at the First Things blog, talking about Cards of Identity.

THOMAS A KEMPIS, ON THE PASSION OF CHRIST--includes an amazing reworking of the Song of Songs as a paean to the crucified Christ.

FRANCISCO DE ZURBARAN, "AGNUS DEI."

"THE CONSCIENCE OF MANNERS": My Inside Catholic book column, on Miss Manners....

GRAVES, AT MY COMMAND: The Cigarette Smoking Blogger replies to my post on Paglia; and "Blackadder" replies to my horror-anthology post with the awesomely-titled, "If Reanimating the Dead Is Wrong, I Don't Wanna Be Right."

I don't know that we necessarily disagree, although I need to ponder. My post was more about, "If you do a 'came back wrong' story, this is what I will need in order to feel satisfied by it."

Now, though, I really want to read stories about the returned dead in which they don't come back wrong--there are a lot of possibilities there, from an eerie coziness to harsh rejection of the "returned" by their terrified or resentful relatives to the kinds of issues I touched on in "Now and at the Hour" (PDF--something similar to the point Adam Greenwood makes at the Vox-Nova link). How did people treat Lazarus? What was it like for him, and those around him, when he came again to death?

I JUST FOUND the page at Ave Maria Press where you can order Faith at the Edge: A New Generation of Catholic Writers Reflect on Life, Love, Sex, and Other Mysteries ... a book I'm in. (I contributed a chapter on Gay Catholic Whatnot.)

LEFT AND LEAVING: InsideCatholic has a whole raft (a big raft) of responses to or riffs on that Pew survey on Americans' tumultuous religious lives. The whole megillah (...yeah, no) is here; my contribution is here; the one I liked best might be Mark Shea's, here. Amy Welborn is hosting a thread with some responses to my piece and to the entire feature--worth reading, including/especially the comments critical of my approach.

SURREALPOLITIK: I have a review in the current Commonweal of the Philadelphia Art Museum's Lee Miller retrospective. The review is subscribers-only now; I'll let you all know if that changes.

Miller--possibly my favorite visual artist, ever--went from fashion model to war correspondent, but despite her immense range and talent has never had a major retrospective until this one. Lots of photos here. An old post of mine on Miller here.

Further communication with her husband seemed hopeless. Between them yawned the chasm that divides those who have consumed champagne before breakfast from those who have not.
--Helen Cresswell, Bagthorpes Haunted

MORE FLIES ON GRAY VELVET: I should just give up and blogroll the Horror Roundtable, you know? This week's entry, on favorite horror locales, gets several terrific responses. (Someone else likes The Bat Whispers!!) I'm adding those Venice movies to my Netflix queue, pronto.

I also keep thinking about my if-only horror anthology. I'm going to talk more about it, which I hope will spark more comment or something rather than diminishing the concept. These are some thoughts on why I hooked each director to their especial trope.

Alain Cavalier, werewolf or serial killer: Therese is probably the best movie I've seen about a saint; and therefore it's a movie about the longing for Heaven, for theosis, for divinization. Werewolf is the opposite trope, man descended into animality rather than raised up into the Divine. I would love to see a werewolf movie with theology. Why is a wolf less terrifying than a werewolf? I think Cavalier could show us.

As for serial killer, Therese used tight close-ups and beautiful, high-contrast darkness/white light shots to convey an enclosed world with few, but intense, relationships. I'd love to see how Cavalier would convey a serial killer's world with many but shallow relationships, nothing below the surface except horror; or a world in which every other person is viewed, by the killer, as just another empty mirror.

Marc Cherry & Alfonso Cuaron, evil carnival: I, uh, loved Desperate Housewives s1 (and liked the next two seasons quite a bit), and also Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and also evil carnivals in all media, from Something Wicked This Way Comes (novel better than movie, though I like both) to "--And The Horses Hiss at Midnight" to Carnival of Souls to Siouxsie's Carousel. Also, I wanted some comedians.

Julie Dash, zombies or anything vodoun: I've said before that I prefer vodoun-style zombies to the Romero-and-after kind. There aren't too many of the kind of zombie movie I like, and all the ones I've seen have a colonialist overtone, even when they also incorporate implicit critiques of colonialism, as White Zombie does. Dash could do zombies without racism, or vodoun used in the way that Catholicism is used in The Exorcist. I'd love to see that.

Hirokazu Koreeda, ghost ship: I've seen two movies by this guy, Maborosi and Nobody Knows. Ghost-ship movies get much of their resonance, for me, from those images of the brooding, anti-meaning ocean, an unintelligible sublime that's the opposite of God. Maborosi proves that Koreeda (? not sure which is his surname, actually) could do that. Ghost-ship movies also require the contrast between the ocean outside and the tight, enclosed, human-infested spaces of the ship--"terra firma in inner man"--and Nobody Knows proves that HK could do that part too.

Richard O'Brien, sometimes they come back: Heh, this was more random: I wanted O'Brien, because he's awesome and hilarious, and I wanted "sometimes they come back" because I'm obsessed with it yet find few examples of it done the way I want.

Pet Sematary (novel, not movie) was amazing, King's best work; but most "came back wrong" stories rely on an over-easy assertion that it's wrong to cheat death without any sense of why that might be true. My most blatant example of this is the Buffy episode right after "The Body"--I can't remember the title, but if you've seen it you know the one I mean--where there's an explicit conversation about why bringing back the dead might be wrong, but you never get anything beyond, "Uh, it might not work."

Pet Sematary, I think, actually shows the protagonist's confusion of love with self-comfort and self-projection from fairly early on in the story--what he wants back is only partly the dead beloved. Mostly he wants to stop hurting--which is incredibly sympathetic... but not quite the same thing. And so it makes sense to me that he gets back nothing but a familiar skin filled with projected horror. It resonates with CS Lewis's observation, in A Grief Observed, that death replaced the real and surprising beloved with cliched, sentimental, self-projecting and predictable memories and fantasies of her: It's just false to say she "lived on in his memory."

THE REAGAN HORROR PICTURE SHOW: Shock Treatment. This is "the other Richard O'Brien movie," basically: a quasi-sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And if you're thinking there's a reason lightning didn't strike twice, you're right--but Shock Treatment is still immensely, totally fun, and you guys should see it! I loved it.

It opens with a fairly tame satire of feel-good television and local boosterism, at the Denton (Home of Happiness) TV station. Even at the start, three of the most notable aspects of the movie are in place: The tunes are incredibly catchy (I have "Denton, Denton U.S.A.!" ringing in my head right now...), the style is '80s rather than '70s (it's incredibly fun to hear O'Brien tackle the first hints of MTV pop and New Wave), and the satire is much broader and more open than in RHPS. Rocky Horror isn't fundamentally satirical; Shock Treatment is. I'm guessing that's one reason the much more protean RHPS is the one that became a cult hit. You would definitely not find lyrics about Denton's "tolerance for/the ethnic races" in Rocky. Similarly, there's a later, really fun song, which ends with the lines, "Faggots/are maggots!/Thank God I'm a man," which: too broad for Rocky by a country mile.

Its themes are almost eerily '80s in their specificity: marital breakdown (Brad and Janet are in trouble, and the shock treatment of the title is intended to make Brad a better husband), anxieties of masculinity, and the nexus of consumerism and televangelism. This is a much more bourgeois movie than Rocky. (And, sadly, much less gay.) It's less sexy, too, with the exception of a brief, fondly perverse interlude between O'Brien's character (not Riffraff) and Patricia Quinn's (not Magenta).

Random note: Susan Sarandon was replaced by Jessica Harper as Janet. This works not only because Harper is good enough to handle the fairly blank role, but also because her voice is much darker and huskier than Sarandon's, which is a fun, unexpected interpretation of Janet's changed personality after marriage. She's certainly not an iconic actress like Sarandon; but she doesn't have to be.

PROBLEM W/LINKS: For a while now, using the "copy shortcut" function to create links to a specific blog post here has produced something with a tail that looks like this: ...#7726700524016777480#7726700524016777480

when it should look like this: ...#7726700524016777480

Does anyone know how to fix? People have been linking to me, and the links take you to the top of the month's archives, rather than anchoring to the specific post they want to cite.

(Also, of course, if you're linking to me, you can erase the extra tail manually when you create the link. My apologies for the inconvenience!)

"SHE TREATS POEMS LIKE PICTURES": Unqualified Offerings gives a more charitable, and quite interesting, reading of one of the problems I had with Sexual Personae. Comments also interesting.

"APHRODITE TRIED AND FAILED": Elizabeth Hand, Generation Loss. I would have loved this book in junior high.

Partly, that's because I could recognize good prose! Generation Loss is a lit-suspense novel about a washed-up junkie photographer (the awful title is a photo-jargon term, not that that's an excuse) who travels to darkest Maine to interview a reclusive artist, and stumbles into a decades-long, "the '70s were evil"-style mystery surrounding an abandoned artists' colony. The descriptions of Maine's harsh beauty are terrific--some of the best nature writing I've read in a while--and the metaphors and assorted prosy flotsam are frequently great. The use and rhythmic recurrence of symbolism (the vicious fisher cats, the snapping turtles...) reminded me of Stephen King, which from me is a big compliment.

And the novel stars two really horrible women who are nonetheless charismatic and compelling. I mean... Cass, the washout, is the only person who knows that her ex-girlfriend died in the World Trade Center on 9/11; she sees missing-person flyers for her, but doesn't tell the woman's family what happened. I'm amazed that I nonetheless wanted to read about her, rather than just growling, "Yeah, whatever, Hand, you think you're so edgy" and hurling the book away in disgust.

There are hints of Donna Tartt territory, "looking for ekstasis in all the wrong places," although this book is just much less intelligent than The Secret History. And several of the book's themes or elements are things I really love: "out of the past," photography, and characters who are worthless until they're needed, to name three.

What ruins the novel is its underlying worldview. One of the central ideas of the book, introduced very early, is that this is the story of how Cass dealt with one of the defining moments of her life: the moment when she didn't fight her rapist. (I think this is paralleled to her 9/11 awfulness, above, and resolved in the same later sequence of actions; I really don't like this parallel, but as prose, it's done pretty subtly.) I'm... really interested in reading about responses to violence, and in fact, this question is the reason I kept reading when, early on, the prose was all cussy and attitudinal.

But this is a story of redemptive violence--albeit one without the usual American echoes or photonegatives of the Gospel. And it turns out that while I'm deeply drawn to stories of redemptive violence, I can't stand those stories when they're presented with moralizing and death-fetishism, both of which are strongly present in the book's climax and denouement. (If you read the novel: the two places where the phrase "Good girl" appears? Haaaaaaaate.) Or to put it another way, stories of redemptive violence work as tragedy. They don't work, at all, as a gothed-out Girl Scout Handbook.

THE BEST FORTUNE COOKIE EVER. Via About Last Night.

LATE-NIGHT DOUBLE FEATURE PICTURE SHOW. I watched One, Two, Three and You Can Count on Me last night. Very scattered thoughts follow.

One, Two, Three (Billy Wilder satire on Coca-Cola exec in divided Berlin) wasn't really my thing--lots of rapid-fire yelling to make the script seem wittier than it is. Hanns Lothar, as the exec's assistant of dubious wartime background, was terrific, stealing scenes from James Cagney left and right. (So to speak.)

But the opening scenes really worked for me, because of their bad taste. I mean this: The humor in the movie is often really skin-crawling in its breezy evocation of the Nazi and Soviet terrors. It isn't usually very witty, unexpected, or penetrating humor--stuff like, the Coke exec's wife responds to her husband's demands with a wry, "Yes, mein Fuhrer"--but it's really, really tasteless, and that's exactly the right move. It's the humor of a society rebuilt on bad conscience, harsh power differentials which nobody talks about unless they need to make threats, and a ferocious need to look away, to focus on the surface rather than any underlying horrors. The jokes in this movie are the opposite of a Truth and Reconciliation Committee. It's a terrific atmosphere, and I think I'm hoping for something similar when the first season of the new Battlestar Galactica finally surfaces in my Netflix queue.

You Can Count on Me is a comedy-drama with about 10% of the former to 90% of the latter. It's small-town realism about a brother, a sister, and the sister's son, all of whom (and really all of the other characters) are adrift and seeking a purpose, something greater than a mere escape.

I want to say I Netflix'd it because Terry Teachout said it was such an accurate picture of small-town life. I'm certainly not the person to ask about that aspect... but I usually don't like realist movies, and I liked this one a lot. The characters and their dilemmas are believable and compelling; the movie is almost two hours long, but never seemed to drag. The director's commentary, which I watched afterward, is only intermittently interesting, but it did explain that the director doesn't share certain perspectives which nonetheless get portrayed with quiet tenderness in the movie.

I don't know that I have anything interesting at all to say about this movie, but it was very good. And it continues my Matthew Broderick streak--I have never yet seen him in a bad movie!

"THUS WE KNOW THE SQUID'S SECRET GENDER.": Sexual Personae. I'm developing a theory that you can tell more about a work of literary criticism by what doesn't appear in its index than by what does. One tendril of this theory posits that any lit-crit work is fundamentally unsound if it devotes more than two sentences to de Sade and not a one to Pauline Reage (our true nouvelle Heloise). I find both the theory and its subtheory (...so to speak) vindicated by Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae, a big, weird, brilliant, silly book that sometimes seemed more lacuna than presence.

This is a big-idea book, revolving around the opposition of mother-nature-chaos and son-reason-linearity-order. (And yes, I know that's an oversimplification, but I'm trying to give people some sense of what they're getting into, here....) Each of the sexual personae turns out to be one attempt among many to negotiate or conquer this opposition.

If you want to get the best of this book, I'd suggest starting with the chapters on Spenser and Dickinson and then seeing if you want more. I really love both authors, and was not sure I wanted Paglia getting her lipstick all over them, but her readings in those chapters are terrific--violent, erotic, brash, but always rooted firmly in the awesome texts. I think there may have been one minor problem with the Spenser chapter--it's been almost a month since I finished the book, so I may be misremembering, but I vaguely recall insufficient attention being paid to The Faerie Queene as a narrative progression rather than a series of episodes or incidents--but in general, these were fantastic, challenging chapters.

Paglia is better at picking her battles than many academics working the same Everything Is Either Phallic Or Vaginal territory. Several times, I found myself saying, "Oh, c'mon, you're just being trendy with that reading--this bit really isn't about daemonic lesbians or whatever"... but then she'd quote a few more passages from the same work, and I'd have to say, "Uh... you know, she's kind of on to something here." That didn't always happen--her reading of De Profundis as Wilde's sentimental return to his mommy is just infuriatingly bad, more on this in a moment--but it happened often enough that I'd say she earned the benefit of the doubt with me.

My real problem with Paglia, I think, is that she and I consider different things interesting and important--worth taking the time to explore on their own terms and as fully as possible. I summarized this to Ratty as, "She'll go to the mat for the belief that cats have rich inner lives, but she doesn't seem to think the Crucifixion is worth talking about."

I'm pretty sure her lack of attention to the Crucifixion is related to her disdain for King Lear ("obvious"--well, yes, Camille, torture is generally obvious, that's kind of the point of torture) and to the bathos of her utterly annoying misreadings of Wilde. (I will say that her take on The Importance of Being Earnest is fun and mostly right. Her failure, which is large but not devastating, is that she doesn't take the play as a narrative of conflict and resolution. Paglia points out lots of interesting things about that conflict, but she swerves around the fact that it is resolved, and that it would be a much less satisfying play without that resolution.) Paglia's unwillingness to consider suffering and powerlessness as points of view is as ideological as any Randroid's. You can see it in her oh-so-edgy approving use of the term "fascism"--seriously, lady often sounds like a repressed homosexual with a crush on a skinhead, and it's not a good look for her--and it genuinely warps her criticism.

I feel like I should mention the strenuous overwriting, so... here I am, mentioning it. "The real honeyed crotch in which we all drown is the womb-tomb of mother nature"--that's a completely random example from the page opposite the squiddess--there's one of those on every other page, and you just have to resign yourself to it. I'm tempted to say that this stuff got into the book because Paglia was trying to import the techniques of classroom performance into writing, and written lit-crit requires different performance techniques; not sure if I'm giving her too much credit, there.

...Finally, the title of this post is entirely within context. Respect, y'all.

Comments, criticisms, howls of execration? Email me with your chthonic and/or fascist insights....

THOMAS MANN ON THE GROTESQUE AS ANTI-BOURGEOIS STYLE. Oooh, shiny.

PRAYING WITH LIOR. This looks pretty fascinating:

An engrossing, wrenching and tender documentary film, PRAYING WITH LIOR introduces Lior Liebling, also called "the little rebbe." Lior has Down syndrome, and has spent his entire life praying with utter abandon. Is he a "spiritual genius" as many around him say? Or simply the vessel that contains everyone’s unfulfilled wishes and expectations? Lior – whose name means "my light" — lost his mother at age six, and her words and spirit hover over the film. While everyone agrees Lior is closer to God, he’s also a burden, a best friend, an inspiration, and an embarrassment, depending on which family member is speaking. As Lior approaches Bar Mitzvah, the Jewish coming-of-age ceremony different characters provides a window into life spent "praying with Lior." The movie poses difficult questions such as what is "disability" and who really talks to God? Told with intimacy and humor, PRAYING WITH LIOR is a family story, a triumph story, a grief story, a divinely-inspired story.

more

I'll try to see it if it comes to DC. Link via Amptoons.

"...The world of today is one in which religion, if it is to mean anything at all, must seem to have been invented by Bunyan and had teeth put into it by Dostoyevsky. This means that only those who have been indescribably wicked in the past can hope to be religious in the future: indeed, I would go further, and say that the only road to Rome nowadays is via Moscow. There are alternative by-ways: many intellectuals, for example, have a soft place in their hearts for drunkenness, moral cowardice, sexual quiddities, and other non-political vices, which, if practised frantically enough, serve, they say, as adequate preliminaries to the religious state. Some o fthem even argue that the two states are inseparable and that the man most likely to succeed is he who carries prayer in one holster and a really good vice in the other, firing each according to whim. Be that as it may, the fact remains that the old-fashioned notion of religion as a sort of everyday affair in which everyone can join has quite gone out: the only devout ones today are those who really have something to be devout about."
--Cards of Identity

FIVE FLIES ON GRAY VELVET: The current Horror Roundtable asks participants to name the five directors they'd want to do a horror anthology flick. (Via Sean Collins.) I decided to do five non-genre contenders; can't sleep, so added suggestions for possible tropes, as well. I genuinely would love to see every single one of these.

Alain Cavalier: werewolves; or serial killer
Marc Cherry: evil carnival (grar! actually he's a writer, of course, not a director--so okay, he'll write this one--why not get Alfonso Cuaron to direct, he seems all evil-carnivalish)
Julie Dash: zombies, or anything vodoun-related
Hirokazu Koreeda: ghost ship
another writer!: Richard O'Brien, because he's been on my mind, and I need him and Marc Cherry to balance this otherwise quite depressing line-up: Sometimes They Come Back

(Admittedly, I've only seen one film each by Cavalier and Dash--Therese [the 1986 one] and Daughters of the Dust, respectively--but I know what I like.)

Another inzombiac thought: Wouldn't (selected episodes from) the Metamorphoses make a great horror anthology?? Actaeon and Narcissus are the ones I thought of first, but you all should feel free to chime in with more possibilities, comments, elaborations, etc.

"Why, if one day Beau disappeared, how I would take on! I would search for him in every house in England; whenever I saw a man I would go up as close as possible to him and stare into his eyes, listen to his voice, study his walk and ways! I would sound alarms all through the country, and never rest until I found the man in whom Beau was hidden."
--Cards of Identity

KITCHEN ADVENTURE: SOUP IS GOOD FOOD. In which I make an onion soup.

Day One: Make steamed broccoli in the microwave, using the juice from a lemon. Eat that! Put the broccoli bits and bobs and the squozen lemon halves in a pot, barely cover with water, add some dried bay leaves, and make stock: Bring to a boil, then simmer about 40 minutes. You want a very lemony stock. Refrigerate overnight.

Day Two: Slice some onion. (I used one large yellow onion for one person.) Put water on to boil. Saute the onion with chopped garlic until it's browned but not burnt. I cooked it in a mix of butter and olive oil; I'm sure you could use just butter, not sure if it would work as well with just oil. This part required more stirring than I'd anticipated--this is not really a soup you can make without paying any attention.

When the water boils, add some pasta--I used fusilli, which were a perfect shape, small and stubby and ridgy. Small shells might also work well. You don't need a lot of pasta. Cook until you're about halfway to al dente, then drain the pasta and put it in the pan with the onion. Add enough stock for the pasta to soak it up and keep cooking. (I added stock twice--added more when the pasta soaked up the first schloop of stock.) Add a lot of black pepper, and cook until the pasta is ready. Pour soup into bowl, top with grated Parmesan cheese, say grace, and plant your face in the bowl.

the verdict: This was delicious. A great balance of onion, garlic, pepper, lemon, and Parmesan. I admit that it was more labor-intensive than I'd expected, so I'm not sure how often I'll make it (it isn't at all difficult--I'm just lazy), but it tasted great.

bonus tip: In general, you can get great results from pasta sauce by 1) cooking the pasta only halfway, 2) draining the pasta but reserving a couple cups or so of its cooking water, 3) putting the half-cooked pasta in the saucepan, and 4) cooking it the rest of the way in the sauce and as much of the reserved cooking water as you need to keep the sauce from drying out. This I learned from Christopher Kimball, "The Kitchen Detective," in Year's Best Food Writing 2004. He says: "The pasta and sauce will likely look drier than normal but will be moist and flavorful upon tasting."

CLOTHES READING: I have a review of the Met's "blog.mode: addressing fashion" show, at the Weekly Standard. Unfortunately, it's only available to subscribers, so I don't actually know if they used my "fashion lolcat" line.... The rest of the article is better than the opening, I think.

A VENDING MACHINE. FOR CROWS. (Via Rattus.)

"...But we know, don't we, that many an atom bomb is merely a Mrs Finch? Think of her as a piece of film, wedged deep in the unconscious. We cannot eject her, so we place behind her the powerful light of guilty evasiveness, which projects her upon the screen of the outer world, distorted into the likeness of a bomb. Thus we rid ourselves of an internal mother, by transforming her into an external explosive."

"Then the atom bomb does not exist?"

"Some of my colleagues say that it doesn't: they lump it in with the other internal problems, like road-accidents, industrial injuries, cancer, death, and so on. Personally, I'm a middle-of-the-road sort of man: I believe that machinery, and motor-cars in particular, are intrinsically dangerous. I even claim that they have the power of moving quite often in a direction opposite to the one demanded by their victim's neurosis...."
--Nigel Dennis, Cards of Identity (this maybe isn't the best quotation, but I'm really, really enjoying this book)

GARFIELD MINUS GARFIELD. Hee hee!! (Via Unqualified Offerings.)

FLANNERY O'CONNOR THING TOMORROW NIGHT IN D.C.: I can't go, but thought some of you all might be interested:

Subject: Flannery O'Connor Presentation

Crossroads and the John Paul II Cultural Center are glad to invite you to a discussion on the work of Flannery O'Connor with PAUL ELIE on Thursday, February 28th at 6:30 pm at the John Paul II Cultural Center, 3900 Harewood Road NE, Washington, DC. Opening remarks by Dana Gioia, NEA Chair.

The Event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will
follow.

This is the third appointment in our "Pursuit of Happiness in Literature" series, which began on November 13th with "We are Such Stuff as Dreams are Made Of," a discussion of Shakespeare's sonnets with NEA Chair Dana Gioia and a presentation on Jack Kerouac led by Kevin Starr.

Coming up: "Gatsby and the Green Light," a discussion of the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

To know more about this initiative and for directions, visit http://www.crossroadsnyc.com/homeDC.html

But no matter how similar the clothes of men and women may appear, or how different, the arrangements of each are always being made with respect to the other. Male and female clothing, taken together, illustrates what people wish the relation between men and women to be, besides indicating the separate peace each sex is making with fashion or custom at any given time. Without looking at what men are wearing, it's impossible to understand women's clothes, and vice versa. The history of dress, including its current history, so far has to be perceived as a duet for men and women performing on the same stage. There may come a time when sexuality is not visualized in clothing as rightly divided into two main categories, but so far it still is.
--Sex and Suits, mostly for the second sentence

THE RUINED LIBRARY. Stunning. Via Ross Douthat, I think.

(And reminded me of my two-a.m. idea for a bumper sticker--"I'll be post-Christian in the post-apocalypse".... But then, a lot of things remind me of that bumper sticker.)

AFF MARRIAGE ROUNDTABLE PODCAST: Me, Jamie Alan Aycock, James Poulos, and Jonathan Rauch, on "Is Marriage Outdated?" The Cigarette Smoking Blogger picks out probably the most interesting thing I said (I was very scatterbrained) here....

Nature, of course, ordains that human beings be completed by clothing, not left bare in their own insufficient skins.
--Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress (recommended by Manolo for the Men)

MOUTH WRITING CHECKS: I have unproductive insomnia and a lot of work-reading to do, so I'm not sure I can slap anything substantive up here until the weekend. But! at some point in the very near future, I should have posts on: Sexual Personae (and squid), "The Reagan Horror Picture Show," alienation fetish, and maybe authorial intent if I can think of a fourth point that's cooler than the three I've got now. And, of course, whatever else staggers (and swears) over the mental threshold.

HOLYWOOD: Barbara Nicolosi writes:
Act One Summer Programs--Applications Now Being Accepted!
Summer Screenwriting Program: The Act One Screenwriting Program trains talented Christians for careers as mainstream film and television writers. The program takes place in the heart of the Hollywood entertainment industry with intensive classroom instruction and mentoring from a world-class faculty of over 50 top-notch TV and movie writers, agents and producers. Among those you will learn from include Hollywood pros like Dean Batali (That 70s Show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Scott Derrickson (The Exorcism of Emily Rose), Monica Macer (Lost, Prison Break), Bill Marsilii (Deja Vu) and David McFadzean (Home Improvement, What Women Want).

"Act One helps the Christian writer overcome the temptation to ignore or
oversimplify the arduous task of integrating faith and creativity. It provides not only a serious investigation into the art and craft of screenwriting, but also a challenge to think deeply about content."
- Scott Derrickson, writer/director, The Exorcism of Emily Rose

Act One Summer Screenwriting Program
July 11 - August 4, 2008
Los Angeles, CA
Program Dates and Applications
Applications available at: http://www.actoneprogram.com/
Deadline: March 13, 2008 by 5:00 pm
**********************************************************
The Summer Entertainment Executive Program: In partnership with Pepperdine University's Graziadio School of Business & Management, Act One operates a rigorous 12-week training and internship program to prepare Christian entrepreneurs, attorneys, corporate executives and MBA's for executive careers in mainstream entertainment. Our elite faculty includes Hollywood professionals from the top networks, studios, agencies and production companies, including: Producers Ralph Winter (Fantastic Four, X-Men), Steve McEveety (The Passion of the Christ, Braveheart) & Howard Kazanjian (Raiders of the Lost Ark); TV Executive Producers Dean Batali (That 70's Show) & John Tinker (Boston Public, NCIS); Studio, Network and Agency Executives Jocelyn Diaz (Development Exec, ABC) & Terry Botwick (President, Vanguard Animation and Film; former Senior VP at CBS); Chuck Slocum (Assistant Executive Director, WGA West); Exhibitor Michael Pade (Executive VP, Regal Cinemas); Christian scholars Dallas Willard (The Divine Conspiracy) & Larry Poland (Master Media International); and many more.

Act One Executive Program 2008
June 5 - August 22, 2008
Los Angeles, CA
Applications available at: http://www.actoneprogram.com/
Deadline: March 14, 2008 by 12:00 pm
For more information visit http://www.actoneprogram.com/.

SAME GOOGLE, DIFFERENT WORLDS: Search requests which led viewers to this blog.

without a kazoo
Freaky state quarters
find something that is bizarre
biological control of week by fugees, bacteri
Jk rowling’s cleavage
what significant contributions did the jews make
sermon illustrations Daffy duck
carnival of souls lesbian [OM NOM NOM NOM!!!]
Donna Tartt Rene Girard
art vs children [Whoa, I actually kind of wrote about this.]
painting of pope cooking sauce
cruel chinese woman squid
the character og iago [“From this time forth, Og never will speak word.”] metro slime sea clone human DNA
I will never go to graduate school
persuasive writing spare me for turkey dinner william shakespeare
how far can you go without being gay [Schenectady.]
historical shark
chicken cacciaguida recipe
cayenne effect on dreams
spiritual meaning of artichoke
how do I become someone else
jesus painted on a saw blade
hack tushnet
theology of the body david bowie [An album title to beat "Confessions on a Dance Floor"!]
Exposit pizza
satisfying fattiness yummy

Society holds trials for the same reason that Shakespeare had comic relief in Macbeth. So try to make everyone laugh. Pleading innocent is usually the best way to do this.
--PJ O'Rourke, Modern Manners

MORE TORTURE LINKS. Religious Coalition Against Torture.

Stop Torture.

ACLU site.

My old series of posts on the subject. (Start there and scroll down.)

And if you have a senator, call today. I'm sorry I didn't see that earlier. Via Mark Shea and Stop Torture.

"THEOLOGY OF THE BODY IN PAIN." I review The Body in Pain, and talk about torture more generally, for Inside Catholic.

Beauty is an encroachment upon autonomy.
--Sexual Personae

"REPEAT THE SOUNDING JOY": I have a piece on repetitive prayer, in the newly-relaunched Godspy!

Romantic imagination faced evil without the organized certitudes of church and state. The power to punish was taken over by the self. Hence the nineteenth-century abundance of daemonic epiphanies of the double. The self ambushes, harasses, flails itself.
--Sexual Personae

I LIVE IN A CONDO: And other children's educational classics, from a world where white people are portrayed like American Indians....

YOU CAN HAVE TWO WIVES IN THE ARMY, BUT ONE'S TOO MANY FOR ME: I'll be on a panel on "Is Marriage Outdated?", this February 12. Details:

AFF DC February Roundtable: Is Marriage Outdated?
The America's Future Foundation will hold its monthly roundtable on Tuesday, February 12th. In the spirit of Valentines Day, we will consider the question of marriage. Is it outdated? Or, should we care about preserving the institution now more than ever?

Joining us will be James Polous, Eve Tushnet, and Jonathan Rauch, author of Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America. Also joining us will be Jamie Alan Aycock, a lawyer in Washington, D.C. and recent author of "Contracting out of the Culture Wars: How the Law Should Enforce and Communities of Faith Should Encourage More Enduring Marital Commitments" (PDF) in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy.

The event will take place at the Fund for American Studies, 1706 New Hampshire Avenue, NW, near Dupont Circle. Drinks at 6:30; Roundtable begins at 7:00. Roundtables are free for members, $5 for non-members. So join today! Please RSVP to Cindy Cerquitella at cindy@americasfuture.org.
----------------------------------------
Eve adds: I'm not sure yet what I want to talk about (and whether I can be sufficiently non-pomo), so if you have ideas or want to yell at me or whatever, feel free to email. More details as I know them....

BOOK MEME: I think I've done this before? But I was tagged, so here goes:
1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people. [I'm skipping this part. Y'all consider yourselves tagged, or not, as you prefer....]

Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World:

That the war deaths occurred on behalf of a terrain in which pianos could be played and bicycles could be pedalled, where schools would each day be entered by restrained and extravagantly gesturing children alike, must be indicated by appending the direction of motive, "for my country," since the deaths themselves are the unmaking of the embodied terrain of pianos and bicycles, classmates, comrades, and schools.

For My Country. Thus "to kill and to die"--or in the idiom that embraces both simultaneously, "to hurt" (to hurt within one's own body; to hurt an opponent's body) or "to alter body tissue"--are alike in having no interior referent and, if they are to have one, requiring a separate specification. But precisely because there is nothing "interior" that itself stipulates and in doing so limits its referent, the act of "dying" or "killing" can be lifted away and coupled with a different referent.

Cheery! Aren't you glad you asked??

[Decadence] operaticizes by overliteralizing.
--Sexual Personae

MY SISTER on a FindLaw piece about fanfiction, in which she was quoted. Her reaction to the piece is pretty similar to my own, though much more knowledgeable!

...[T]he fact that Hilden can’t tell we’re already in the nightmare world suggests something about how scary we ought to find it.

more

(not legally relevant, but possibly interesting: me on fanfiction)

MORE FAVORITE BIBLE VERSES! Yay. (Mine are here.)

It cost too much, staying human.

and other six-word stories, here! (Some of them--esp. the political ones, sigh--are trite, but the good ones are really fun.)

LIE BECOMES THE TRUTH: I recently amused myself by listing things that are true of me when I'm writing fiction, and at no other time. (Or, let's say, at few other times!) Here are a few, posted in hopes that they will amuse you all as well.

I'm a reactionary. You know, I'm really much more of a liberal than my fiction expresses. "How They Made the Manticore" is both a parable that really resonates with me, and a temptation I need to recognize and sometimes work against in my fiction. I don't want to write "All change is bad! Progress is perverse!", not only because I don't believe that but also because Jesus wouldn't agree.

I'm 50/50 bisexual. In "real life" (que significa eso?) I'm... you can either say, "I'm 85/15 lesbian," or, "I'm maybe 60/40 attracted to women vs. men on a physical level, but in terms of emotional orientation and romance, I'm much more likely to be romantically and even iconically drawn to a woman than to a man."

[eta: This isn't quite right, you know. I'm dykier than this suggests. Not sure what would adequately convey the issue, other than a) iconicity is far more important to me than the Kinsey scale could ever recognize, and b) less excitingly (and by "exciting" I always mean "metaphysical"), I'm always gayer than you think I am, though usually less gay than you expect. Think of it that way--isn't that illuminating? ;) ]

But I can always tell when I find a character's image in my head physically attractive; and, intriguingly, I split really close to 50/50 lady/guy there.

I obsess more about death than about suffering. In my extrafictional life, the reverse of this is usually true. (Have I mentioned that I'm more liberal than you think I am?)

And the next novel will really focus on suffering--as the recent novel did, in many ways--whereas death, in both novels, is merely one cause or form of suffering among others. But in my short fiction, "the candles blew and then he appeared"... partly, I'm sure, because it's death that makes repentance necessary. "When there's no future, how can there be sin?"--because sin as a concept is always embedded in a narrative of possible repentance and also missed opportunities for that repentance. Sin is an irrevocable act, and that act can only exist, be reckoned with, and be reconciled in a world where sinners die.

That isn't the entire reason--it only explains let's say three or four of the skeleton-haunted stories I've written--but it's interesting in its own right, so I'll say it, and let time and change sort out the rest.

THE RATTLE OF THE CASTANETS: Horror movie notes. In the order I saw them.

Soylent Green: Should be remembered as the great Edward G. Robinson's last movie, since not only is he the only standout in the cast but his death scene is the only genuinely poignant and frightening moment in the film.

Admittedly, this is one where pop culture may have ruined it for me. And there are some powerful images of overcrowding--casually jumping down the staircase packed with bodies, for example, or the fight scene in the dormitory. [eta: Also liked the creepily dissociated priest.] But I loved Charlton Heston in Branagh's Hamlet (as the Player King--he was the star of that movie as far as I'm concerned), and hated him here, overblown and ripe with cliche. Robinson is terrific as always--especially impressive considering that he was almost completely deaf by this time, and had to time his lines from memory rather than by ear.

White Zombie: Well, I may be learning that I prefer really old-school horror, and especially old-school zombies, to the new brain-eating kind. I did like this, and found it frightening (the shot of the zombies marching across the top of a hill is terrifying), despite its melodrama. It's a less-good version of the phenomenal and far more iconic I Walked with a Zombie, I think; or you could say, what I think is the same thing, that it's a magic-and-science version of the religion-drenched IWWAZ. It has fairy-tale elements (why do white women on filmic Haitian plantations always dress as medieval houris?) and creepy postcolonial horror-of-dehumanization.

The Leopard Man. This Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur flick may have been my favorite of the lot, largely due to the charismatic women at its center: a local New Mexican cheapie flamenco dancer named Clo-Clo, an exotic Chicago import named Kiki, and a sweet, nicely underplayed fortuneteller. All three actresses elevate the movie--Clo-Clo's introductory scene is kind of static (I may be totally weird, but I found her flamenco... strained, insufficiently sinuous), but after that, she becomes incredibly fun to watch and listen to; Kiki is a brassy Rosalind Russell knockoff; and the fortuneteller is played for empathy rather than exoticism. The movie really revolves around women, and not only women as victims of the Leopard Man.

It's a well-paced mix of horror and suspense: The plot is more suspense, while the imagery (including the soundtrack) is more horror.

The Ghost Ship: More Lewton-as-producer. More misleading Lewton titles! I know it's the studio's fault really, but I love ghost-ship movies, and this... isn't one. It's an overdone petty-dictator thrillerish thing, long on melodramatic invocations of "authority!... authority!" and short on thrills. I'm guessing they didn't have the budget to do any frightening shots of the restless, formless, anti-rational sea, but those shots might be what I like best in ghost-ship movies, and to be trapped on a thoroughly static shipboard set felt forced and gimcrack rather than effectively claustrophobic. The only Lewtonish thing I've actively disliked so far.

If you want shipboard authority drama combined with the uncanny, read The Secret Sharer; if you want a ghost-ship movie, you might check out two movies from 2002: the psychologically interesting but not quite addictive-enough Below and (my cliched but addictive preference) Ghost Ship. (If you know of genuinely good, rather than merely satisfying, ghost-ship movies, please email me, since I crave them and have found none!!)

CATHOLIC RADIO INTERNATIONAL is reading through Matthew Lickona's Swimming with Scapulars. I... uh... still haven't read his book (although he acknowledged that he still hasn't read mine either!), but I've heard great things about it....

IN WHICH ARCHBISHOP CHAPUT DISCUSSES VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE FOR MORE THAN ONE PARAGRAPH. He's an odd mix of cautionary and crypto-fannish, all "this isn't just a game, it's a complex form of storytelling to create an alternate reality!" (V:TM might be the only roleplaying game I've played; can't remember if I also dipped a toe into Shadowrun.)

About a week ago I got an email informing me that I’d been turned into a vampire. I like to keep up on current events, so I went to the web address where this was posted. (more)

Link via JRB.

TODAY IS AN INTERNATIONAL DAY OF PRAYER FOR KENYA.

Rosalind fulfills Christopher Isherwood's definition of camp: she mocks something, her love for Orlando, which she takes seriously. Her supreme moment of high camp is the wooing scene, where she pretends to be what she really is--Rosalind.
--Sexual Personae

I'M IN A BOOK!: I contributed a chapter on various gay-Catholic stuff to Faith at the Edge: A New Generation of Catholic Writers Reflects on Life, Love, Sex, and Other Mysteries, forthcoming in March from Ave Maria Press. I know I rant and warble about this stuff all the time, but I think there are some new things in this piece, and specifically I think it's different in both style and content from my big Commonweal piece. I don't know who all contributed, since Amazon doesn't have a table of contents up yet, but I'll let you know as soon as possible--the book info at Amazon lists "celebrated contributors like Paula Huston, Matthew Lickona, and John Zmirak." I'm guessing it will be a mackerel-snapping delight.

In self-love there is no energy of duality and therefore no spiritual progression.
--Sexual Personae on Spenser's Faerie Queene. Not entirely out of context! It made me think of my post on The Faerie Queene and the multiplicity of vocation, although I expect La Paglia would turn up her nose at such a chaste little post. I do wish she'd accept that there are ways of playing out existential dramas other than through sex (or at least, in addition to sex!), you know, and sometimes people even make art about those ways....

EVERYTHING IS EITHER EVOCATIVE OR PROVOCATIVE.

SPAIN VS. GOD: THE ENDARKENING: The entirety of Dali's paintings for The Divine Comedy, here; and for Alice in Wonderland (!), here. These are amazing, by the way--Rattus and I saw some of them in New York, and these web clips really don't do them justice. The Divine Comedy ones, especially, showed Dali's ability to work in such a wide range of styles, from Toulouse-Lautrec curvilinearity to watercolor wash to fleshy realism, and deploy each style in service of an entirely Christian surrealism.

Blogwatch from the stars,
Blogwatch from the stars...

Monster Brains: Images of the Harrowing of Hell. (And isn't this, also, one?--via Amy Welborn.) I'm blogrolling this guy--Sean Collins turned me on to him, and I know that Sean's linked him in the past, but apparently I've become more monstrous in the past few months. (I certainly haven't become brainier.)

What do real thugs (TM) think of The Wire? Via Noli Irritare Leones. I haven't watched The Wire (dude, it's in my queue, yes I know I'm the only blogger in DC not to have watched it already) and also haven't read this piece yet, so there may be spoilers--I'm linking to it because I think you guys might want it, and so that I can find it easily once I've finally gotten my fangs stuck in to the series.

"Twilight of the Books": Ratty is right--this is a lot more interesting than the usual oh-tempura-oh-morays death of the books journalism:

It’s difficult to prove that oral and literate people think differently; orality, Havelock observed, doesn’t “fossilize” except through its nemesis, writing. But some supporting evidence came to hand in 1974, when Aleksandr R. Luria, a Soviet psychologist, published a study based on interviews conducted in
the nineteen-thirties with illiterate and newly literate peasants in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Luria found that illiterates had a “graphic-functional” way of thinking that seemed to vanish as they were schooled. In naming colors, for example, literate people said “dark blue” or “light yellow,” but illiterates used metaphorical names like “liver,” “peach,” “decayed teeth,” and “cotton in bloom.” Literates saw optical illusions; illiterates sometimes didn’t.

Experimenters showed peasants drawings of a hammer, a saw, an axe, and a log and then asked them to choose the three items that were similar. Illiterates resisted, saying that all the items were useful. If pressed, they considered throwing out the hammer; the situation of chopping wood seemed more cogent to
them than any conceptual category. ...

...As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth.

more

And last: Fin de Siecle Russian Cat. (Via Ratty... of course.)

Drama, a Dionysian mode, turned against Dionysus in making the passage from ritual to mimesis, that is, from action to representation.
--Camille Paglia's Farmer's Miscellany of Wig-Job Pronunciamentos, by which I mean, Sexual Personae. Not that "wig-job" is always a term of disapproval, around these parts. Possibly it's a job description.

EVERYBODY DID IT!: Plot devices of Agatha Christie novels. Via the Rat, who introduced me to this particular gun moll. Spoilerous like whoa.

WHEREVER YOU GO, THERE YOU ARE: An absolutely lovely t-shirt rendering of the first snow in space.

THE RETROFUTURE IS OURS, COMRADE!: German and Russian paleofutures.

Yes, let us proceed with our education, one and all.
--The Breast

As a student, then a professor, my experience of literature was necessarily contaminated by self-consciousness and the burden of verbalization; either I was learning or I was teaching. But that is behind me, like much else; now I am just listening.
--The Breast

And I hadn't even made my suggestion yet about becoming a reader for the department; he was laughing not because of anything ludicrous I had proposed, but because he saw that it was true, I actually had turned into a breast.
--The Breast

No, the victim does not subscribe to the wish-fulfillment theory, and I advise you not to, neat and fashionable and delightfully punitive as it may be.Reality is grander than that. Reality has more style. There. For those of you who cannot live without one, a moral to this tale. "Reality has style," concludes the embittered profesor who became a female breast. Go, you sleek, self-satisfied Houyhnhnms, and moralize on that!
--The Breast

CALL HER NATASHA WHEN SHE LOOKS LIKE ELSIE:

...Marlowe's problem is that he tries to wield women's inscrutability for
dramatic effect. His men do unexpected things because they're tormented, or
heroic, or power-mad, and unpacking his men's little mysteries will yield
interesting conclusions about torment, heroism, and lust for power. Isabella and
Zenocrate are mysterious, but reflecting on their little mysteries will just
leave you thinking, "Oh, women." ...Trying to make your tragic women
clear the larger-than-life bar by using their feminine mystique (ooh,
enigmatic!) is weird and disconcerting.

mas

"It would appear," I tell Dr. Klinger, "that my analysis has 'taken'; a tribute to you, sir." He chuckles. "You were always stronger than you thought." "I would as soon never have had to find out. And besides, it's not so. I can't live like this any longer." "Yet you have, you do."
--Philip Roth, The Breast

HOW TO BE BAD: I review the Shakespeare Theatre's productions of Tamburlaine and Edward II. Also, I learn that you shouldn't do best-of lists before the New Year; I think this is better than the Book of Jane review, and should've been the fifth entry in my best-of-published-Eve list.

AFRESH, AFRESH, AFRESH: Best of 2007. I'm going to New Jersey tomorrow, and it's unlikely that I'll do more than maybe a kitchen-adventures post between now and the champagne. So I'm doing my best-ofs list now. (2006, 2005, 2004)

Best books read (nonfiction): Rene Girard, The Scapegoat
Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of WWII
Richard Klein, Cigarettes Are Sublime
Philip Roth, Reading Myself and Others
Ye gods, slim pickin's here. I'm going to cheat and name St. Aelred's Spiritual Friendship as the fifth-best, since I don't think I understood it the first time around.

Best books read (real books): Albert Camus, The Plague
Edmund White, Nocturnes for the King of Naples
Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
Tim Powers, Last Call
Philip Roth, Everyman

Best movies watched for the first time (thus Withnail & I doesn't count--but I need to tell you that if you buy the DVD, you get an awesome poster!):
The Battle of Algiers and Nobody Knows (tie, because they're in the same post, so I feel like I can get away with it)
The Queen
The Chimes at Midnight
The Importance of Being Earnest
Sullivan's Travels

honorable mentions: A Night to Remember--an exceptionally well-paced Titanic movie; I was shocked at how strongly it affected me--and Ratatouille, an intensely sweet, conscientious kids' flick.

Best blog posts: This was a strange year for me and the blog. I wrote a lot less, partly because I was focusing on finishing the novel and partly because I was practicing the better part of valor for once. (I say it so you don't have to!) So this list isn't quite up to previous standards, hence the category below. Still, here it is, six of the best (and yes, as the phrase suggests, this is a punishment):
That's what you get for having fun (random notes about New Haven and theology and humiliation and... hamburgers)
Age of Apocalypse: medieval manuscripts as comics
The Man-Mary (This post, I think, should be treated as a thought experiment rather than a position statement. When I think about it as A Defense Of The Male Priesthood I think it's tinfoil; when I think about it as a way of using gender roles to illuminate modes of Christian life, I think it's kind of awesome. And also, I know you haven't heard back from me yet, if you emailed me about this post--I totally read your email and thought it was terrific [everyone who emailed me about this post said something amazingly helpful] and I will try to respond soon...ish.)
All alone at the '64 World's Fair: The Politics of Dancing takes on "Ana Ng" (and more)
You're gonna need someone on your side (a prayer to St. Simon of Cyrene)
Voice-casting the New Testament

Best things I wrote (nonfiction, non-blog):
"O tell me the truth about love" (homosexuality and the Catholic Church--a reply to Luke Timothy Johnson)
"Grace Is the Hardest Pillow" (I review Kathy Shaidle's poetry collection Lobotomy Magnificat)
"The Sacred Cardoon" (I review a show of Spanish art, "El Greco to Picasso")
"Naked but not Exposed" (I review an Edward Hopper retrospective)
"Job Wears Prada" (I bite the shins of a chick-lit rewriting of Job)

Best new candidate for political office who isn't Ron Paul: Shamed! Shamed! Shamed! I swear I'll give you money next month!

Best new blog I haven't told you about yet: The Cigarette Smoking Blog. I'm biased, but I think this blog about "Conservatism, Catholicism, Yale, film and music, one cigarette at a time" is always fun and intermittently brilliant (which is more than I can say for my own, that's for daggone sure). Film noir, cheatin' songs, and counterpleasures, with Wilde on her side. I don't think undergraduates should blog. But if they must blog, they should blog like this.

Tonight the blogwatch let me down...

Dark October 316: "the unspeakable abyss of God's love"

Disputations: Advent Medea and more....

First Things: Basic Christmas homily from Fr. Neuhaus, but some elements of this struck me--the helplessness of the unborn and infant Christ; & the connection between the need for bodily resurrection and the Real Presence in the Eucharist. The latter reminded me of some stuff from A Grief Observed, about the way even grief replaces the true beloved with the lover's unwittingly Stepfordized image of her....

And tentacle chandeliers!!!!! Via The Corner.

Later in life, a man would expect to find in his wife the one thing that he could not expect to find among his peers--honesty. Parrhesia, unflinching frankness with one's fellows and superiors, was an infinitely rare and precious commodity. It could be had only from the only two authoritative figures who stood to one side of political life--from a philosopher and from one's wife.
--Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity

But what to me is all this quintessence of dust?
--Withnail and I

PROFESSIONALISM. Apparently I totally didn't notice when my review of The Book of Jane was published on Nat'l Review Online.

Some say there’s a fine line between genius and madness. The Book of Jane is a chick-lit rewriting of the Book of Job.

more

This movie proves you don't need to have a good plot.
--DVD commentary on Withnail & I

She had thought one
thousand years
the limit of her time,
but is confounded
she even harbored such fancies.
Now her long
absent lover has harrowed
and driven her soul
to the grave: "Never,"
she swears, "will I mention
his name again," but no
sooner said and her
heart kindles like tinder.
--from "Distant Dove," Judah Halevi, tr. Gabriel Levin

Show me the way to the next blogwatch bar....

Abhay Khosla on the City of Glass comic; me, less ecstatically but still noting its awesomeness, on ditto. eta: HA, I just read to the end of this post, and it's distilled Abhay spectacularo. Seriously, he grabs one of the reasons "we still like comics," and this post as a whole is one of the reasons I'll always like Abhay's stuff. Click on the link for the bubblegum wrapper, too.

Dappled Things is going off the air. Awww!! You'll be missed.... While looking for the City of Glass review, I found this post from him, which is really powerful and something I very much needed right now, about living in imperfect communion:

...The acts of piety and witness of prayerfulness and Christian sacrifice that have impressed me most have not been those of the walking saints (because, in a way, I expect it of them), but rather of the obviously flawed people whose relationship with God and the Church is visibly messed up. When I learn that one of them is in the perpetual adoration chapel everyday, or that they have practiced heroic acts of charity toward a neighbor, or they faithfully say the rosary even though it's been years since they could go to Communion: this fills me with great hope -- for them, for me, and for all sorts of people who might be tempted to think that God and the Church have written them off.

more--you should really read the whole thing

Mark Shea: Heretic saints. (The post is actually about something else.) More on this from me in a bit.

And a call for submissions to a book about how the theology of the body has changed lives. Via Shea.

"Hurry now to your friend's house and his wine,
as drinks go round like the sun
to his right. The wineglass purifies
the wine's ruddiness--even rubies
are put to shame by its coral glow.
It beholds and keeps secret the splendor of its vintage
until it can no longer conceal it."
But wine imbibed banishes all my troubles;
this is the sign of the covenant
drawn up between us--while a colorful band
of singers and musicians press round me,
each more striking than the other.
--Judah Halevi, "Wine Songs #2," in Poems from the Diwan tr. Gabriel Levin

"When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical."
--Ralph Ellison, via Ratty

HARK! THE HERALD ANGELS SING, glory to the squid-born king!

Oh yeah, I had sexual intercourse with her. But not in the Biblical sense.
--A Bit of Fry and Laurie

"NAKED BUT NOT EXPOSED": I review the National Gallery of Art's Edward Hopper exhibit for Commonweal.

The money gets divided--
the blogwatch gets excited--

Disputed Mutability: Have I mentioned that I end up quoting every other post from this hemi, demi, quasi ex-gay lady? Here, she visits a "Love Won Out" conference, and manages to nail a lot of what I found most awful. She finds the words for the things I struggled to express. RARGH, I can't figure out how to quote stuff, so just: If you want to hear about the irrelevance of "origin stories," the creepy fungibility of LWO's concept of "love," and the fact that compassion requires listening, cliquez-vous ici. She's so honest and awesome and smart.

Watchmen movie site: Analyses and general Mooreness. I'm on the second page sounding dumb.

The Jews of The Magic Barrel and the Jews of The Assistant are not the Jews of New York City or Chicago. They are Malamud's inventions, a metaphor of sorts to stand for certain possibilities and promises, and I am further inclined to believe that when I read the statement attributed to Malamud which goes, "All men are Jews." In fact, we know this is not so; even the men who are Jews aren't sure they're Jews.
--Philip Roth, "Writing American Fiction," in Reading Myself and Others

Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician's finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess gambit: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game. --G.H. Hardy, something I don't know what

ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS: SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF HOLY MOTHER CHURCH EDITION.

Aelred: Well, so I'm a moron. For some reason I thought, on first reading, that St. Aelred didn't grasp or address the sacrifices necessary for friendship. In fact, he says that friends should endure "crucifixion" for one another (with all that implies).

One, I'm an idiot, and two, you absolutely should read Spiritual Friendship, which I think is the most amazing neo-Platonist document I've read barring The Confessions which is kind of an unfair comparison. Aelred understands Plato's method as well as his conclusions; so if it's the Platonic method you love--which you should, since that's the point--you should read Spiritual Friendship immediately after The Symposium. It's actually more neo-Platonist than The Confessions.

St. Therese: So I had a conversation with the friend who had recommended Maurice and Therese, after I dissed it on the blog. And I figured out that there are different kinds of friendship. The M & T one is... based on mutual love of Christ and trust of one another, without face-to-face contact--almost like internet friendships.

I'd promoted Aelred over M & T, but that misses the point. Aelred lives out a model of philosophical friendship, where mutual pursuit of truth binds people together over distance and time. I think Aelred has a lot of insights that are especially applicable to people whose closest friends aren't Christian. He talks about friendship that isn't explicitly, necessarily, centered on Christ, whereas Maurice and Therese are entirely about their common purpose in Christ.

Morrissey: So yeah, I dissed You Are the Quarry, and I was right. It's frequently awful.

But I didn't realize that some parts of it are addictive. I'd say tracks 2 through 10 or 11 are... the kind of thing I end up listening to a lot, whether or not I like it. It isn't anywhere near the artistic achievement of Ringleader of the Tormentors, much more like the pop interest of Viva Hate and Your Arsenal. But I was wrong to suggest that Southpaw Grammar was better--it's desperately boring, and I can't imagine listening to it for fun--and I'll also say that Vauxhall and I is good enough, though not great. I really like it. The only truly great Morrissey album is Ringleader, though the early ones come close.

I think I will go back to listening to "You Have Killed Me" now.

WORDS, WORDS, WORDS: Arden Forest has a very awesome list of 10 favorite non-Psalms Bible passages, here.

KITCHEN ADVENTURES: BUTTER MAKES IT BETTER. I learned to cook brussels sprouts! It only took two tries.

#1: Trimmed sprouts (=cut off the top and bottom, and discarded whichever leaves came away when I did that) and roasted them at 400 with french-fry sliced small yellow potatoes tossed in olive oil. Stirred after ten minutes and added a sweet onion chopped into quarters. The result: delicious roasted onion, okayish fries, and unhelpful sprouts--blackened and unpleasantly crispy on one side, not cooked enough on the other. It's possible that other people's ovens would do this dish better.

#2: Trimmed sprouts. Boiled salted water, then added sprouts and cooked 10 minutes. Let sprouts cool and halved them. Cooked sprouts in saucepan with a startling amount of butter, some whole milk, Parrano cheese, and (in this order) black pepper, cayenne, and dried basil. (I think they cooked about six minutes, but I could be wrong--basically, cook until pliant and tasty.) Eaten on top of thick, buttered oatmeal toast.

This was delicious. Scarily yummy. A thinner bread wouldn't work; but then, neither would a thick roll.

Parrano is a thickish, melty cheese, dark yellow, with a grainy sharp quality that distinguishes it from various yummy cheddars but puts it roughly in that category. You'd use Parrano for a macaroni and cheese. It's tangy and "cheesy," doesn't disappear into a dish, but doesn't continue to assert itself the way goat cheeses do. Basically, if you eat a sharp white cheddar and think, "Yeah, but it could be deeper, or darker," then this might work for you. So that's the kind of cheese I used--I think a lighter or more obvious cheese would totally work, though. You could probably use my old standby, Sargento's shredded Mexican cheese blend, with no harm done.

#3: Same as above, except that I chopped the boiled sprouts instead of halving them, used just melty cheese (I forget what kind) instead of milk and cheese, and had them with buttered pasta. This wasn't quite as good as the above, but I think that's mostly because brussels sprouts in butter want to be eaten with toast, not spaghetti. They need something they can stand up to. This was still a wonderful dish, but I did think toast would have been a better match for the delectable creamy vegetables.

That a passion for freedom--chiefly from the bondage of a heartbreaking past--plunges Lucy Nelson into a bondage more gruesome and ultimately insupportable is the pathetic and ugly irony on which the novel turns. I wonder if that might not also describe what befalls the protagonist of Portnoy's Complaint.
--Philip Roth, "Document Dated July 27, 1969," in Reading Myself and Others. I don't think this is the only or best possible reading of either novel (and I suspect Roth would agree), but it's really interesting. My super short post about When She Was Good.

UH... AND HAPPY THANKSGIVING, AND STUFF: Pretty Bird Woman House, a shelter for Native American victims of domestic violence, was vandalized and burnt, and could really use some help. Via Minisinoo, who adds: "This is legit; there's been plenty of talk about it on the native Listservs, and our NAS department is gathering funds. Both the above links tell you how you can donate. If you happen to be in college and it has a Native American Studies department and/or an Inter-Tribal Student Council (ITSC), they may be collecting funds as well. Due to the rural nature of many reservations, assistance for abused native women is hard to come by. Even if you have no money to give, at least go and read the articles, as many people are unaware of the abuse situation facing so many native women."

Thank you very much for the Blogwatch Times,
Thank you very much, thank you very very much...

Dark October 618: More Bible verses!

Hit & Run: A case of conscience?

The Horror Blog: Great horror movie taglines. My favorite is from a postcard advertising 28 Days Later, and turns out to be well-timed: BE GRATEFUL FOR EVERYTHING, FOR SOON THERE WILL BE NOTHING.

Via Sean Collins, who adds more here.

The artists of the Middle Ages painted allegories, we say. What really happened was that they saw more clearly than we do, and painted what they saw--angels and devils, beasts, and half-human monsters like me.
--Gene Wolfe, Pirate Freedom, via Claw of the Conciliator; reminds me of my post about genre as realism.